contrib. The Whole Protestant Community (1985) to the Field Day Pamphlet Series (No. 7); elected TCD Fellow; appt. Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin, TCD, c.1998; issued A Critical Life of W. B. Yeats (1999); elected MRIA and appt. Chairman of the RIA Committee for Anglo-Irish Studies; serving committee member for Anglo-Irish Literature, European Soc. for the Study of English [ESSE];

a conference celebrating his contribution to Irish criticism, along with that of Seamus Deane, planned at Clonliffe for 2005; appt. Dean of Arts and Humanities at TCD in 2006; appt. visiting fellow at Cambridge Univ., 2007; he was the subject of a festchrift in 2010, with contribs. by leading academics and writers incl. a poem by Seamus Heaney which afterwards appeared as the title-poem of his collection The Human Chain (2010 - viz, Human Chain); emeritus in 2010; Brown is the recipient of the title-poem in Seamus Heaneys The Human Chain (2010), and a tribute-poem - Dundalk Signal Box - by Michael Longley in A Hundred Doors (2011).

Commentary
W. J. McCormack, Terence Brown and the Historians, in The Battle of the Books (Dublin: Lilliput 1986), pp.40-47: discusses the nexus of history and literary culture in F. S. L. Lyons, Oliver MacDonagh, et al., and adjudges Browns Social and Cultural History simply the very best available (p.45; see further under Conor Cruise OBrien, Commentary, infra.)

J. J. Lee, The Irish, in OFaoláin Special Issue, Cork Review, ed,. Seán Dunne (Cork 1991), p.66-67, describes Browns Ireland: Social and Cultural History as a fulfilment of Sean OFaolains prediction and hope that somebody may write an Irish Social History and give a different value to events. (Lee, op. cit., p.67.)

Thomas Kinsella: Kinsella is scathing of Terence Browns conception of Northern Voices and a distinct tradition of Ulster poetry which he believes to be Unionist propaganda for a separate province - with the non-Unionist counties edited out, but praises what he regards as Browns evolving political consciousness. (See The Dual Tradition, 1995 Edn.) Note: Kinsellas remarks in this connection became part of his curmudgeonly legend - see under Kinsella, infra.

Hermione Lee, review of Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats [with Brenda Maddox, Yeatss Ghosts], in NY Times, Book Review (21 Nov. 1999): [Brown] repeatedly tells us that apparent contradiction was the basis of Yeatss developing artistic personality, that his lack of assurance, and his ineluctably divided nature became the dynamic of his writings. Lee approves Brown as properly severe on Yeats quarrelsome brutality, snobbery, ruthlessness and extremism, but laments the writing as too often stuffy and verbose, calling for a Poundian red-pencil in relation to such sentences as: Yet it is wide of the mark in failing to grasp the tragic import [of] an excoriating vision of irrevocable action as ineluctable destiny. Epithets like redolent, bespeak, purport, adumbrate are targeted also. (See quotations, under W. B. Yeats, infra.)

QuotationsLanguage revival: The revival attempt, therefore, despite its apparent radicalism, can be seem as rather more a reactionary expression of the deep conservatism of mind that governed public attitudes in the period than as a revolutionary movement. (Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1972, 1981, p.67.)

Irish Catholicism: The Church [ ] offered to most Irishmen and women in the period a way to be Irish which set them apart from the rest of the inhabitants of the British Isles, meeting the needs thereby of a nascent Irish nationalism at a time when the Irish language and the Gaelic culture of the past were were enduring a protracted decline. Bound up in the past with the traditional Gaelic way of life [ ] historically associated with the repression of the eighteenth century when the native priesthood had heroically resisted the proscription of their faith, permeated with that profound sense of the supernatural which had characterised the countryside for centuries, Catholicism was richly endowed with attributes appropriate to its modern role in the nations life. Strengthened by the Roman vigour of the devotional revolution [ ] the Catholic faith of the majority of the Irish people became therefore intimately linked with the national feeling. Accordingly [ ] Irish Catholicism increasingly became a badge of national identity. (Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1972, London: Fontana 1981, pp.28-29.)

Artists & the Troubles (in the 1970s): No longer do artists and writers find themselves able or willing to work in anything like a distinctive national mode, nor do they feel able to mount a social criticism of a society with clearly defined targets for attack. Paradoxically, this inclination on the part of artists and writers to fulfil clearly defined social and national roles has co-existed with demands that they do so. As Irish people began to sense their changing circumstances and as the Northern crisis challenged much that they had taken for granted about the national life, it was the artist and particularly the writer who was often expected to provide some kind of guidance as to the way forward. Writers were therefore asked to reflect [ ] on [ ] the substance of Irish identity and on how that bore on the contemporary struggle in the North. (p.321-22; quoted in Loredana Salis, ‘So Greek with Consequence: Classical Tragedy in Contemporary Irish Drama, PhD Diss., UUC, 2005.)

IE joins EC: Was it the case that when the issue of reunification became for once a real one the Republic preferred to look the other way and to proceed with business as usual - in the EEC, in trade, with Britain, welcoming British tourists, refusing to confront Britain in too direct a fashion, adopting at moments an unworthy ambivalence of word and action in relation to conflicting ideological imperatives? (Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1985 [2nd edn.] (London: Fontana 1985, p.283; in Loredana Salis, op. cit., 2005.)

Censorship Act (1929): [M]uch more than a law to suppress the grosser forms of pornography, [it] had been revealed to be a legal instrument that could be used to protect Ireland from contamination by alien influences and by Irish writers who did not accept the dominant moral and social consensus. The political censorship of the war years can accordingly be understood as a further attempt by the political class in Ireland to use laws restricting freedom of expressin for ideological purposes. In oth the literary and political censorship, national identity was at issue. Both involved notions of Irish exceptionalism, which presumed spiritual and moral superiority to other nations at its heart. (Review of Donal Ó Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland, Cork UP 1996, in Irish Studies Review, 20, Autumn 1997, pp.45-46; cited in Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature, London: Pluto Press 1998.)

Translating Ireland, in Gerald Dawe & Jonathan Williams, eds., Krino (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1996), pp.137-40: Often enough in the past, translation from the Irish was an act of nationalist piety; an expression of atavistic need, or even the consequence of a deliberate programme. One gets no sense of such from the recent work. Rather, the translations often seem to take for granted that the meium through which most people in Ireland experience their world and live their lives is English and that it is wholly appropriate that an Irish poet should write, if he or she wishes, in that language. The sense of guilt which sometimes dogged English language poets of an earlier generation no longer seems endemic. That the ascination for translation from Irish seems to imply is not a nostalgia for some truly indigenous expression, nor any revivalist enthusiasm, but a sense that the complexity of the Irihs poets contemporary experience requires an interpretative resource which current English language usage somehow fails fully to supply. (p.137.) Further, Concurrent with this recent reinvigoration of bilingual poetic endeavour has been the related phenomenon of translation of poetry from the European languages. Once again in much of this work one senses a desire to expand the field of contemporary vision and to add to possible ways of conceiving of the present in an English language poetry. For the poems from such places come with the imprint of a savage and terrible history on their very structures, bearing the mark of pain in the flesh of their language, courage in the syntactical scruple with which they comport themselves in the face of terror. They afford the Irish poet a way of deepening the local sense of a frighteningly flawed national life while they offer a means of escape from a futility and inanity which must result form the fact that our flawed Irish world only occasionally presses with a defining immediacy on the individual. (p.138.)

War memorials: Brown remarks on the larger suppressions and resurfacings in Irish consciousness of the profound effects upon Irish life of the Great War itself, as well as the difficulty of addressing these in the public domain since memories of the war and attitudes to it differ so greatly, bespeaking current points of stress and division. The Great War is one of the great unspokens of Irish life, something which rattles skeletons in many a family closet, something which even now cannot find that full expression which would lay to rest for ever all its Irish victims. It is, one supposes, part of hte unfinished business of our curent imbroglio. (Who Dares to Speak?: Ireland and the Great War, in Robert Clark & Piero Boitani, eds., English Studies in Transition: Papers from the Inaugural ESSE Conference, London: Routledge 1993, pp.227-28; quoted in Heinz Kosok, ‘The Easter Rising versus the Battle of the Somme: Irish Plays about the First World War as Documents of the Post-colonial Condition, in Munira H. Mutran & Laura P. Z. Izarra, eds., Irish Studies in Brazil, Sao Paolo 2005, pp.91-92.) Note, Brown elsewhere speaks of Northern Unionists and the tragic conflict of legitimate interests which had generated the recent conflict in their native land, which but for the catastrophic events in the greater European theatre might have resulted in an Irish civil war between the forces of Nationalism and unionism. (review of Paul Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question: Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism 1912-1916, OUP 1995, in Irish Literary Supplement, Spring 1996, p.9.)

NotesW.B. Yeats: A Critical Life (1999) - Publishers notice: widely regarded as the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century, believed that the life of a lyric poet was an experiment in living that should be told. This new critical biography seeks to tell that story as it unfolded in the various contexts in which Yeats worked as an artist and as a public figure. It considers a career that began in the late Victorian world of 1880s and 1890s London, which involved a deep commitment to the life of an emergent Ireland in the twentieth century, disillusionment and the alienation from the modern world that made Yeats, who began as a symbolist poet, one of the major figures of the Modernist movement in the second decade of the century. A central focus of this study is Yeats perennial pursuit of sacral power which he saw as being vested in traditional institutions. It examines how at various stages of his life he sought to acquire such power for himself in such institutions as a magical order, a nation, a theatre, the community of the dead, and, climactically, an occult marriage. The concluding stages of the book assess Yeats final years as a crisis of that faith in institutions, which had hitherto sustained him in all he attempted. At the last only the institution of the verse itself retained its efficacy in the end. This study allows us to gain a much deeper appreciation of the poets engagement with occult knowledge and power and with spiritualist illumination. It explores this problematic aspect of the poets career as bearing on key elements in the experience of modernity: the roles of science and religion, the emancipation of women and the artistic representation of the body. In this book all Yeats major works as poet and dramatist are considered in the contexts in which they came to be written and published.